September 2012 Entries

I’m an iPhone user, but I’m still pretty excited about Windows Mobile Phone. And here’s why. As a Microsoft Developer, it just makes sense for me to be. I’ve been involved with the development of a couple of simple apps/games for WM7, and the level of integration with developer tools that I already use is just so compelling. Microsoft really knows how to appeal to developers, and even though I’m not in love with XAML, the whole experience of writing apps using an IDE and a language that you already know is just so… easy. Secondly, I...

I came across this neat quote on the topic of cross-platform development: Write Once Run Anywhere: Do you hate your users? Most cross-platform solutions benefit developers and customers, but rarely value users and user experience. The quote came from this slide deck covering the rise of Xamarin, however I found it via this Fast Chicken blog post. It’s a bit of a generalisation of course, as surely some of these tools can create good applications if they’re used well, but in general I agree with the sentiment. The main reason the quote made...

About me

My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a developer, consultant, business owner and writer based in Auckland,
New Zealand. My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, Azure, jQuery, Ajax,
SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies. I also have about 15 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies.

One of the breaking changes which was made with
the 1.0 release of the Microsoft Ajax Extensions was the renaming
of the 'Debug' class to 'Sys.Debug' for reasons of compatiability
with other frameworks. Breaking changes like this can often be a source of frustration..

A textbox character counter is a pretty simple piece of functionality, and there's a lot of different ways to apply one to your application. The following method is nice and simple, and can be done using only clientside JavaScript if required, or combined with server side code in order to create a more dynamic effect